Localising a Bilingual Game Site
Path-prefix structure, parallel drafting, what we translate versus what we localise. The technical and editorial realities of running a bilingual site.
Hage Game ships in English and Simplified Chinese. Every game, every article, every legal page, every navigation menu, every error state. We made that choice on day one and have lived with the consequences for the entire project. This article is about what bilingual publishing actually costs technically and editorially — and why we think it is worth that cost.
The technical structure
The site uses a path-prefix model: English content lives at the root (/games/pulse-lock/), Chinese content lives under a /zh/ prefix (/zh/games/pulse-lock/). Each language version is a complete, independent HTML file rather than a translation pulled at runtime. The page declares its language via the html lang attribute, links to its counterpart with rel="alternate" hreflang tags, and sets canonical URLs correctly so that search engines understand the two pages are the same content in different languages, not duplicate content.
This structure is conservative and has been the SEO consensus for bilingual sites for over a decade. The alternative — serving different content based on Accept-Language headers or geolocation — is more clever but causes problems: search engines have trouble indexing it, users cannot reliably share URLs in their preferred language, and the user's first impression depends on a guess about their preference rather than their explicit choice. Path-prefix is boring. Boring is correct here.
The editorial decision
Bilingual structurally is easy. Bilingual editorially is hard. Every piece of writing on this site exists in two languages, and the two versions need to be the same piece of writing — same argument, same examples, same tone — translated rather than rewritten. The temptation, especially under time pressure, is to write a strong version in one language and a weaker version in the other. We resisted this. Both versions of every page were drafted in parallel and edited together, by the same person, in a single session per piece.
This is slower than writing only one. It is meaningfully cheaper than translating later, however, because the second version benefits from the first version's structure being already worked out. Writing the Chinese after the English (or vice versa) takes roughly 60% of the time of writing the first, not 100%. The economics are still worse than monolingual publishing, but not catastrophically so.
What we translate and what we localise
The distinction matters. Translating is producing the same content in another language; localising is adapting content for a different cultural context. We translate almost everything. We localise sparingly. Game mechanics, scoring rules, technical claims, and editorial opinions are translated literally — a 4.7 score is 4.7 in both languages, and a claim that the game is the best in the issue is the same claim in both languages.
What we do localise: examples and analogies, where one language has a more natural reference. The "boustrophedon" analogy for snake game strategy works in English because the Greek loanword has a small literary register; in Chinese, "牛耕式" (the same agricultural image, ox-ploughing) reads more naturally to a Chinese reader than transliterating the Greek would. Date formats follow each language's convention. The page's metaphorical scaffolding occasionally differs. The argument never does.
Why the cost is worth it
The most honest reason is that we are a Chinese-speaking team publishing for both Chinese and global audiences, and an English-only site would exclude the writers from their own work. The second reason is that bilingual coverage roughly doubles the addressable readership without doubling the underlying effort (game development, hosting, design — none of which are duplicated). The third reason is search visibility: search engines index both versions, and Chinese-language queries about HTML5 browser games can find us in a way they could not if we only existed in English.
None of this would matter if the second version were significantly worse than the first. The reason to publish bilingually is to publish well in both languages. If you cannot do that, monolingual is the more honest choice.
Published · 14 May 2026 · Written and signed by Bill